Capitaine Grandeur
by caudelac
Summary: Featuring Grantaire, leader of the Amis de L'ABC, and his wideeyed Disciple, Enjolras. Long ago completed.
1. Dramatis Personae

I. Dramatis Personae  
  
  
Once the café was sufficiently empty, Marion Grantaire let the sneer he'd been suppressing the whole of the evening creep across and transform his mismatched features into a rather remarkable sort of gargoyle's grimace. He sighed and relaxed out of the stiff posture of projected 'presence' he assumed always for meetings; his boots graced the table and a wine bottle made the loving companion of his palm and lips. More satisfying than any mistress, more solace than the sacred confessional, hereby the leader of Les Amis de L'ABC absolved himself of the cumulative sins he perpetrated this and all nights, before the worried eyes of his chief lieutenant, René Combeferre. In the bottle and in the steady, concerned gaze of his partner, Grantaire found some small comfort that was not quite shattered by the anticipation and the other's inevitable speech. Not, mind you, the bottle, though that would have been remarkable indeed -- no, a far more predictable query from the far more predictable source.   
"So, what is it?" asked Combeferre.   
  
Grantaire sighed expansively, his smile ironic. "I think you know."   
  
"Enjolras."   
  
"What else? That boy is a menace. He will get the lot of us killed, or worse."   
  
"He's an idealist."   
  
"My point exactly, and what is worse, is that he thinks that I am so as well! Thank the gods for you, René, that you are not fooled by my theatre."   
  
The words were meant as a compliment and a mollification, Combeferre knew, but he found that he felt neither complimented nor mollified. He spoke slowly and quietly, so that Grantaire almost did not hear him over the roar of liquor in his ears. "Many of the friends that we have gathered to us over time are also idealists. Enjolras is not the only one who believes in the things that you say. I do."   
  
"But you-- and they-- know that I do not."   
  
"That is false."   
  
"You think this of me?" Grantaire raised an eyebrow, to Combeferre's irritation.   
  
"Marion! I know better. I mean to say that your words do inspire minds other than that of the young Enjolras."   
  
"Pfft! They believe in a grotesque. And it does not matter anyway-- they expect nothing of me but that I mollify them with my pretty speeches, night after night. They are the quintessential bourgeois sons, and our little coven is the theatre of the subversive-- a witches' sabbat where they can dream of their rich fathers' heads rolling under the righteous blade as might have happened in '89. The black magic spell is woven in lofty words and grand vagaries: Rights of the People, Rights of Man, Social Contract, French Revolution, Republic, Democracy, Humanity, Civilisation, Progress-- all these things mean so very much nothing, but they can light a bonfire in these boys' souls and create for them the catharsis of the greek tragedies-- they pay for little more than a glass of wine or a baguette, and they go home feeling better. What has that to do with me? They call me Capitaine Grandeur but my name is Punch, and you are my Judy, so of course you know the play. I forgive you. What fault is it of mine if some of the patrons have tricked themselves into believing that there is Meaning behind the great Absurdist Production? Remarkable, isn't it? I have always found this deception amusing. But Enjolras... he is not amusing. He is dangerous. He would have what Les Amis are content to hear about. He is madness incarnate- do you see him, during the meetings, when I am speaking? There is a fire in his eyes and a light in his face that is both alarming and compelling. I find myself frightened to my core, René, for, while I seduce through beautiful words with billowing ephemeral dreams behind them -- this boy will open his mouth, speak two words with all the strength of his conviction behind them, and men will nod their heads. They will raise arms! He will turn my little shadow-play into a macabre -- a tragedy, a Titus Andronicus; and we'll all lose our heads; shriven on the same blade that took Louis St Just and Louis Capet. I don't like it."   
  
Combeferre sighed, and tried again. "Do you not think... Marion, listen to me. It is true; Enjolras has passion; he is a man of conviction. He believes with all his soul in the imminent advent of the Republic, and the People's Revolution, and he believes, however much you do not, that you are the prophet --"   
  
"Hah!" snorted Grantaire, taking a deep gulp.   
  
"-- that you are the prophet of the enlightened era. You have spoken like such a man for years now. You speak with such passion that I know at times you fool yourself."   
  
"Almost."   
  
"You do. I've watched your face when all of a sudden, you realize the truth of what you are saying and it takes you by complete surprise. Because you do speak the truth, Marion. Why do you think that I have always supported you, even knowing what you profess to believe? Or not believe, rather. I know better, but I know better." He crossed his arms, looking Grantaire dead in the eye.   
  
The latter stared back almost soberly, then burst into a soft chuckle. "Pardieu, my love, I almost believe you."   
  
Combeferre, half in irritation, snatched the bottle from him and swallowed enormously. Grantaire watched, impressed, as Combeferre wiped his mouth off and thunked the bottle upon the table. His hand remained absently on its delicate curve.   
  
Grantaire sighed too, compelled somehow to explain further. "You don't understand how much he bothers me, René. It is not just that he foolishly places his faith in me. Pardieu, did you hear what he called me the other day?"   
  
Combeferre closed his eyes and recited, "A visionary and a Shepherd, our Capitaine Grand-R is the Moses who will part the red sea of Tyranny on the one side and Terror on the other, to deliver the people safe and happy to the freedom that is their God-given right."   
  
Grantaire bit his tongue so as not to scoff at particulars. Each word pricked him and made him snigger. Faith, the boy had been listening too much to him, that he had learned to emulate Grantaire's own style of meandering, flighty speech. Dangerous. He gritted his teeth and said, "This is ridiculous. You know it and I know it -- but it makes me nervous. His wide-eyed, fresh-faced faith mocks me; the unblinking purity of his misguided purpose holds a distorting mirror up to my beautiful lie. He makes my lie ugly and dangerous. I almost falter beneath his gaze. But I cannot! I see him watching me and I am almost driven to fervency; I used to play to the mindless crowd, the faces of bright and stupid sheep. They can believe me all they wish, but pardieu, René, Adrien Enjolras is not stupid, nor is he a sheep. I used to play to the shills, but now I find myself more and more playing to him."   
  
"I've noticed." said Combeferre, almost voicelessly.   
  
Grantaire's face lit up. "Are you jealous?"   
  
Combeferre shook his head, and suppressed a smile, not wishing to lighten the mood.   
  
"No. I can't say that I blame you. He's beautiful, isn't he?"   
  
"He is." Combeferre did not protest as Grantaire reclaimed the bottle and resumed speech in a soft, almost tender tone, "It is frightening. I wish to seize him by that gorgeous golden hair and shake him, to make him see that I speak in tongues, in castles, in madness and illusion, that the dreams I carve of the air are no more substantial than those that pour from a bottle of absinthe, and are far less pleasant. But I cannot, and I am also afraid of him discovering this lie. In those moments you spoke of, I find myself giving pause, and I wish-- for moments only!-- to be this man that he believes me to be. But that is impossible. I have no truck with faith. I cannot. I simply cannot. And I know that one day, the rest of the Amis will come to me expecting Capitaine Grandeur, the war god of this gilded youth's vainglorious dreams, and they will find only Marion Grantaire: charlatan, drunkard, imp of the perverse. What will happen when this bright shade looming over me with his hopeful, expectant, maddening eyes looks into my guilty ones and learns the farce that my truth has made of his Truth? Pardieu, we will both break: he will shatter with disillusioning, and I will die of a broken heart. It is a conundrum, a grotesque, an actor's nightmare. And you know what they do to the bad actors? They send them to the place á greves." His sneer returned, and he finished the bottle with a grunt. "You have brought my measuring glass?"   
  
"Of course." Combeferre produced the apparatus from his black bag, the attache of a medical student, while a bottle of Absinthe appeared on the table between them. Combeferre waited while the liquid louched to a pale, fascinating green, before speaking again. "You don't know that. I know you, and I know you, and I retain faith. All you need is to listen to that voice that comes out of your mouth as you stand on your soapbox-- oh, by god, listen to your words! You touch the people, and can further, if you allow Enjolras to drive you, and I will reach them. It doesn't have to be a dream, Marion."   
  
The glass paused halfway to Grantaire's lips. The darkness within him manifested in his eyes and bored holes in his lieutenant. "What do you mean to say?"   
  
"I mean," said Combeferre steadily, ignoring the formal vous that Grantire had used to goad him, "that it will happen. I know that you cannot move, so I have done it for you." Combeferre produced a pamphlet from his back pocket.   
  
The words on the cover were familiar to Grantaire: a slogan of some pith, that he himself had uttered the week previous, meaningless and clever. He shuddered in horror. "You don't mean to show these to people?"   
  
"I already have. Enjolras and Courfeyrac are distributing them tonight."   
  
All traces of good humor and tolerance hit the table with the glass of absinthe. "What in the name of Satan's grandsire have you done!? Do you wish to see me balanced on the point of a bayonet, frog-marched up the steps to the scaffold? Or rather, accompany me? For with this sheet you've signed the death warrant of us all-- of you, and I, and him."   
  
"It is printed anonymously, Grantaire."   
  
"It will be easy enough to trace. Par diable..." He turned away angrily, then barked, "Combeferre?"   
  
"What?"   
  
"I'll see you tomorrow."   
  
"Marion..."   
  
"Leave." He tried to retain some of his force and fury, but the expression on Combeferre's face and his innate, paradoxical gentleness made that impossible. "Please?"   
  
Combeferre sighed. "All right. Try to get home sometime tonight, hien? Goodnight, Marion."   
  
"Goodnight, René." He waited until Combeferre had left before raising the glass to his lips. The scent of anise elicited some small tendril of delight in him even as it dulled the sharp edge of his troubling thoughts.   
  
"It is all right. It doesn't matter anyway. What harm is one little scribble? René should have known better. I shall have to forgive him, shant I? He's really dear, he is. He means well." Sip by loving sip, the liquor granted him further distance and an obscurity like a thick lense of green glass. Grantaire felt giddily content as lack of concern and the reassurance of alchohol melted subsequently into a veneer of dreamless, drunken sleep. 


	2. Night begins to gather over Enjolras

II. Night begins to gather over Enjolras 

It had been ages since darkness had fallen, and no one had bothered to help it get back up, it thought to itself with a curse. Presently, it took its own initiative and found itself blinking into the radiant gaze of the newling sun. The dark smiled. "Hello, Enjolras. How long have you been there?" 

"About fifteen minutes. Are you all right, Capitaine?" 

The concern in the other boy's voice amused Grantaire greatly, and some pith about how he'd not be all right until La Belle France had Liberated Herself from the Manacles of the Tyrannous Monarchy and was Free to Blossom not beneath, but united beautifully with a Representative Government firmly founded on the Divine Truth that All Men Are Created Equal danced theough his dulled mind and was bitten back savagely from the edge of his sharpened tongue. He settled for, "As well as can be expected, mon ami." Let him read what he wills in that, thought Grantaire smugly. Enjolras nodded in satisfaction and made him supress a sigh. Obviously, moved by the desperate state of France under the Bourbon Yoke, "Capitaine Grandeur" had wept and sought solace in an absinthe bottle. Of course, he sneered inwardly. That's it exactly. 

"Of course," said Enjolras, smiling in admiration. 

Grantaire's heart sank in rapture. His smile required no force to come across as slightly grim. "Drink with me?" His hand still stroked the near-empty absinthe bottle, but he noticed that Enjolras blanched just looking at it, and pushed it quickly away in favor of a miraculously full bottle of red wine that Louison had placed there. She was quite familiar with the breakfast habits of the young revolutionary leader. 

Bless her heart, thought Grantaire as he poured two glasses and pushed one towards the other boy. Enjolras stared down at the glass dubiously, but accepted it. He toyed nervously with the stem instead of tasting it immediately. Grantaire's smile grew slightly wry at this, and he raised an eyebrow as Enjolras' bearing grew even more slightly uncomfortable. 

"So," he began, pretending to ignore the mounting and inexplicable disquiet in the other, "have you news for me, Enjolras, or is this a purely social call?" 

Enjolras shifted a little, grimacing over the sip of wine he'd sampled and moving quickly to hide the grimace. "Combeferre told me I could find you here." 

"Did he?" Grantaire raised the other eyebrow. 

Enjolras swallowed another gulp of wine, uncomfortably. "I'm not much of a drinker." He sighed, pushing the glass back towards Grantaire. "I don't care for the taste." 

"That is unsurprising. This is terribly cheap wine from some backwater hamlet in Gers, and red is mercilessly bitter. I shall point you out a truly excellent _vin blanc_, sometime. You're from the Midi too, _n'est-ce pas_?" 

"I'm from Gers myself, actually." 

"You don't say? A real Gascon then! That is a fine thing. My hometown is not far outside." He grinned at Enjolras, who looked terribly blank, and blankly terrified. "Now, why were you looking for me, again?" 

Enjolras opened his mouth, and then closed it, much to Grantaire's amusement. He cleared his throat and began again, "I wanted... I wished to tell y...." He paused and took a deep breath, then said, all in a rush, "I wished to report on tonight's distribution run." 

"Ah, yes, the pamphlets." Grantaire leaned back in his chair, eyes twinkling with merriment as they regarded Enjolras, squirming in his seat as if he were pinned there; a golden insect wriggling helplessly under the poinyard of Grantaire's gaze. "So?" 

Enjolras cleared his throat, and smiled weakly. "It went very well. Like wildfire. The little response we received immediately was entirely favorable. Tomorrow or the next day, we'll know truly how sucessful our mission was." Enjolras' voice grew stronger as he spoke, until, glad to be back to matters of business, he nearly glowed. 

Grantaire silently cursed this formal shift, but he nodded to Enjolras. "Good. Was there anything else?" 

"No, not really..." Enjolras stood, taking that as a request to go. R chuckled. 

"Then _pardieu_ man, sit down and finish your drink. Yes, it's sour, but so is the rule of Louis Philippe. The discipline of the one fortifies us as we endure the other." 

"Today." The light of the spirit inflamed, which had almost faded from Enjolras' eyes, burned brightly once more and Grantaire was guiltily pleased with himself. "For now. With you to guide us, Capitane Grandeur, this outrageous brutalization of our land and people cannot last!" And he threw back half the glass in a gulp, trying desperately not to grimace or spit it out. Grantaire laughed, richly and approvingly. 

"There you go, Adrien. That's the spirit." Enjolras looked up from the glass, and cocked his head to one side. 

"You know my name?" 

"You told it me, when I met you, if you recall." 

"You've never called me anything but Enjolras. I hadn't thought you'd remembered it." 

"I did." Grantaire sipped from his own glass, grinning at Enjolras over the rim. The hairs on the back of Enjolras' neck began to prick up slightly and it occurred to him, through the slight burn the wine had begun to inflict on his mind, that the seeming inanity of this part of the conversation was all facade. He felt himself drawing nearer to a place he could only half see, at dizzying speeds; a feeling only accelerated by the tease in his Capitaine's voice as he asked, "And mine... do you recall it?" 

The wine. Enjolras was mid-sip as the question was asked, and he squeezed his eyes shut through the wash of alcohol fire, nodding. "Uh huh," he swallowed to clear his throat of the burning sensation the liquor created there, "Marion Grantaire,_ n'est-ce pas_?" 

"Right." He smiled softly at the struggling Enjolras, who sighed and determined that he'd have to give up on such vices for now. 

Enjolras looked up at Grantaire's eyes and nearly recoiled at their invasiveness. He looks at me like he wants to burn a hole through me; he thought absently, and then coughed to clear his head. 

Grantaire, for his part, seemed nonplussed. "A little too much, _petit_?"

Enjolras nodded. "Yes. I told you I'm not used to such..." he trailed off, favoring Grantaire with a puzzled frown._Petit_? He was younger than Grantaire, true, but a good head or two taller. 

Grantaire grew almost as delighted as Enjolras was terrified by the sudden change in Enjolras as several thoughts and ideas began to sink in and form as much of a picture as there could be in the youth's unripened mind. Suddenly, it was not a boy, but a man sitting there with a deepening scowl on his face and the wine glass clenched in his hand. Grantaire marvelled at the way anger smouldered blue in the entrancing eyes, which seemed at the moment to be chiselled completely out of ice. It was the angel of vengance, severe and unmovable, dashing by its very existence all of Grantaire's hopes while making his heart and spirit soar. When Enjolras spoke it was in a low, almost menacing near-growl. "You're dead drunk, aren't you?" 

"No, not dead." Grantaire raised his eyes to the blue flames, grinning like an image of Lucifer out of some grotesque catechism. "Drunk, perhaps. But Adrien, _mon petit_, it has nothing to do with liquor." 

Enjolras caught his breath as Grantaire caught a lock of the golden hair; then shook his head to free it and his eyes, also, from Grande R's abysmal gaze. 

"You can't mean..." 

"What can't I mean?" 

The hand Enjolras had shaken off touched his face at the temple and crept softly along his pallid cheek, as if it was drawing out all of his righteous fury through the touch. Enjolras felt hus pride deserting him and shut his eyes, murmuring protests of utter disbelief against the sapping of his will. His hand, the last bastion of his former sentience, advanced with the advertised intention of plucking Grantaire's from his cheek and casting it away. Somewhere, it betrayed him, perhaps as his fingers grazed the back of the roughened hand. Enjolras opened his eyes to meet Grantaire's in a union of mutual shock; doubled with amazement on the one end and triumph on the other. The turncoat fingers laced and locked with those of his leader, and pressed Grantaire's against his cheek. He swallowed and licked his lips; committed, but knowing not how to say so. 

Grantaire, comprehending all, turned his grin of victory into a tender smile, and brushed away a lock of hair from where it had fallen across Enjolras' excellent forehead. "Come home with me, Adrien." The boy -- for he was, once more -- swallowed, staring at the out he was not going to take. 

"All right. But I've never..." He added the last hurriedly, and Grantaire stopped him with a finger to his lips. 

"I know. It's all right. Come on." He leaned forward to ensure the completion of his conquest, and found his prey startled by his forwardness but completely won. When he pulled back after a moment, the dark light in his eyes shocked Enjolras with its dangerous ardency. 

"Come on," repeated Capitaine Grantaire in a husky near-whisper, and Enjolras obeyed. He was not following; they were walking side by side companionably as they made their way through the advance of morning. Fortunately, the fog hung thick about them. It heightened Enjolras' already surreal sense of giddy detachment and lent a veil of obscurity to their journey. It seemed to both, with varying sentiments, that the dawn conspired with them by cloaking them away from the advance of day and the world waking about them, as they prepared to descend into the dark. This is precisely what crossed Enjolras' unquiet mind as he faltered on the threshold of Grantaire's flat. His leader, his idol, his Capitaine Grandeur had entered already, and held the door ajar for him with a diabolic patience. Enjolras did not immediately move. It seemed to him that he stood on the edge of an abyss, and who could tell what lay at the bottom: Paradise, or the pit? Even now, the option hung dimly there: run away, or step off. Off end. Go for it, boy. 

He stared into the void for what seemed like along time before, sans any outside urging, he took a deep breath, tensing for his leap at the edge of the jumping-off place. Determined to find what pleasure he could in descent, he plummeted, and soon found himself landed in the warm arms of Grandeur.


	3. Grantaire and his Lieutenants

III. Grantaire and his Lieutenants 

Almost more than his flat, Grantaire felt at home in the Café Musain's shadowy back room. He had, he felt, a most connubial family there: brother Bottle and sister Glass, brought forth by Louison, the dearest and most lovingly attendant mother one could wish for. The charming domesticity of the scene was completed by the arrival of Combeferre, wife or brother, or perhaps father, Grantaire mused, observing the distinguished manner in which his friend doffed his cap, and the papers under his arm. The self-styled prodigal son did not decide, but raised his glass in salute all the same. 

"Well, René. I imagine that I owe you thanks." 

"For?" 

Grantaire smirked and waved Combeferre over to sit with him. "Of course, he stole away quite before I woke. I think he tripped over a pair of your boots on the way out. " 

Combeferre smiled thinly and sat. "So." 

"So what? Would you like a report, lieutenant? You'll not get one. If you want to know how the good ship Enjolras sails, board him yourself. You'd make an admirable Admiral." 

"Shut up, Marion," said Combeferre good-naturedly as the first of the disciples trickled into the Café Musain's back room and meeting hall. 

These were the true devotees: the Lieutenants. Courfeyrac, a youth as faithful and ardent in his republicanism as he was frivolous and irreverent everywhere else. With him, Bahorel, a red-faced lout of the most excellent sort; a loafer and a cad; of good temper and violent humor. He had been a great favorite of Grantaire's, until, yea, they were accompanied by Adrien, of course. His expression was flushed and seemingly cheerful, but his eyes were tired. Bahorel and Courfeyrac gave their salutes. Enjolras nodded to Grantaire and then to Combeferre. The latter raised an eyebrow, the former shrugged incomprehensibly. 

Following these and some others Grantaire did not recognize came Joly, sagacious hypochondriac; Prouvaire, or Jehan, as it were, the delicate Homer, all the more tragic for that he possessed sight. And, Grantaire smiled, Bossuet, the prototypical buffoon of Moliere; despised of fortune and thus in favor with Grandeur. Following them, with a band of unknown laborer types; Feuilly, self-reliant proletarian; bereft of family, he clung to Grandeur. His wide-eyed enthusiasm and stunning extrapolations proved the appalling seriousness with which he took himself, Grantaire, and almost disturbingly, Enjolras. The subtle shade of difference was that Enjolras could direct himself, but Feuilly needed steerage. A sheep with a brilliant voice. 

And after him, more sheep flocked in. More. And More. And so many more that Grantaire gave up counting the sweating, bright-eyed disciples cramming themselves into the tiny room and reached for the nearest bottle. His hand paused halfway, sensing eyes nervous, wavering, and hot upon him. His soft, weak instinct called for his hand to withdraw, amend, correct the action and play the puritan; to cause that heat to flare once more, draw up in relief eyes now seemingly dilated with doubt. 

"_Caniche_." Growling thus, he pushed past cowardly righteousness and drank deeply. The gaze on him did not desist until he had set the bottle down; by then, the sweet haze in his head bred tenderness at the half-uncertain way in which it ceased. Grantaire imagined he heard behind him a troubled sigh. He hid a smile, but did not investigate. Instead he rose, surveying the raging sea of faith that swelled about him, straining the room's four frail walls. The turbulent roar of anticipatory excitement sucked in on itself as he stood, terrible silence making him its own as he found himself standing, stranded alone on the dizzying precipice of his great lie. But, as frightening as it was, the purity of passion thinly veiled in every face and beneath every breast was food to him, he fed on it instinctively and it transformed him. Almost against his will he felt his heart turn to stone, his eye to ice; the latter met its twin in the gaze of Adrien Enjolras and was half-grudgingly approved. What then was lacking? Reflex fixed the silence unto and beneath Grantaire; expectation possessed the air about him, but he did not speak. He seemed to have frozen, curious as a kitten surveying the blithe hope-light in the assembled faces about him -- even, he realized with a start, in that of Combeferre, who knew. 

And who Knew. Pushed by that and a gulp of absinthe, Grantaire fell off of his own cliff and into the role of Capitaine Grandeur. 

"Citizens," he began, his a voice a quiet breaking and altering the previous quiet, "a day, a week. Each night have you come unto this room with your bottles and your big minds; your university speech and your contract of the year two. You have pronounced '_Vive_!' followed by the names of those who pronounced '_Morte_!' and followed the pronunciation with the louisette; you have shouted down those whose dearest wish is to prolong the tender apathy of the bourgeois life. So have you shouted and stood upon the tables. You have opened your ears to me and I have spilled beautiful dreams like ambrosia unto your slumbering heads. Do you drink, citizens? Do your souls feed upon this divine liquor and do you yourselves feel it, the subtle stirring within yourselves that is the irresistible call of divine purpose? Can you feel the breath of Ares lifting up the tremendous wings of the coming era? Do you see, there, gathering thunderheads, rumbling their ominous overture upon the distant and imminent horizon? Do you see where the old, embarrassed sky is growing pale and thin, a warping roof of frosted glass, in anticipation of the great and glorious breaking? Do you see the hammers, preparing for the fall and do you see, can you see what promised future lies beyond the glass? Tell me, citizens, friends, men -- do you see it? Tell me, tell me what you see." 

Enjolras rose from his seat. "I can see the gathering dusk, Capitaine. I can see the twilight's shroud falling over the noble head of General Lamarque; the rumbling thunder is the discontent boiling in the hearts of the people, weeping silently into their rags as the mighty voice that spoke unto and for them falls forever silent." He sat again. 

There was a grim and thoughtful expression on Grantaire's face and a horrified swirl of thoughts brewing, like the storms of his orations, in his head. He stood there for a moment before speaking, a terrible statuary on a solemn chapel. His next words were slow deliberation. "The mouthpiece of the people falls silent. Have the people themselves no mouth?" 

"The people wear a muzzle, Capitaine," shouted Courfeyrac, "It is called the National Guard and the Army of France. Buckled by Lafayette, tightened by Fouché, and led about by Gisquet." 

"Perhaps," remarked Combeferre, leaning back in his seat, "the people may have no voice in the government. Nor, admittedly, can they hear a shout through the walls of a café's secret room. But deprived of ears and bereft of voice, the people have still eyes to see." He produced the pamphlet of the night before from his waistcoat and placed it on the table, followed by two other papers of a more professional writ. "Voila!" he said, "after the fashion of Desmoulins do I show you how to have words when a voice is wanting. But I protest we want for neither --" At a secret glare from Grantaire; Combeferre fell suddenly silent, but Enjolras had followed closely enough to see this horizon as clearly as all others. 

"_Tiens_!" Enjolras shouted, snatching up a newspaper. "My friends, have you read Le Moniteur and Charivari this week; Le Constitutionel and Le Semaphore the next! Look, you have heard the voice of the people, night after ephemeral night; diaphanous and liberating. But now, today, read of it! Read it to your mothers and your sisters, read it to the poor and uneducated. Take it to your homes and into the streets! Sow it among the alleys and through the city, scatter its seeds into the countryside and see what will grow from mighty origins! These pages, these words are the budding sprouts of revolution. Can you not feel them taking root in your heart and branching out in the heights of your soul? We are the winds that will scatter the words, like the American Johnny Appleseed, and through these efforts shall the sparse weeds that are _le abaissé_ of Paris and France become a mighty forest, full lit by the glory of the radiant sun and the lofty, bright promise of Future: the Promise of Grandeur." 

Then, then the thin little walls groaned in agony against the tumult they so inadequately encircled, the tables pounded and feet stomped until Grantaire, head already as tortured and afire, albeit for a different reason, as the air crackling about it, thought that the room first and then the world would shatter into bits. A hand rested hotly on his shoulder and he turned, saw the same thoughts transmitted with a backdrop of breathless joy in the blazing eyes of young Enjolras, behind him. Grantaire returned a warm and reciprocal smile. Words and promises traded in both glances were lost on neither man, nor on Combeferre, grinning nearby, as he gave orders for the distribution of literature, and discussed with Jehan the setting of the evening's speeches to print. In the fervor of the moment, Enjolras found time to press his lips to Grantaire's forehead in salute, before, with the rest of the crowd, thinning into the night. 

It was a few minutes and several glasses later before Combeferre and Grantaire found themselves alone once more in the almost deafening quiet of the abandoned back room. "Well." Grantaire tried and failed to inject a twinge of irritation into his voice. Instead, he settled on his graduation to the cylinder and absinthe bottle to belay his unquiet mind. Combeferre did not cease smiling. He sat next to Grantaire and took his hand. 

"No fear, Marion. We court greatness this time, not death. You do not have enough faith." 

Grantaire snorted, and opened his mouth, but closed it at a look from Combeferre, and smirked. "Enough?" He said finally, through the peridot haze on his vision, "_Mon cher_ René-Vivien, I've no faith at all. I've no belief and less certainty, for I was never made to lead men. Wherefore do you deign to transform me into a guiding light? By virtue of grandiose adjectives and revolutionary vowels, crafted with none of Prouvaire's talent and all the more lacking for not being set to verse? I am a better Byron than a Desmoulins, _mon cher_. Remember that." 

"_Mais_, Lord Byron will be recited when the last lines of good Camille are forgotten dust." Combeferre's smile was irrepressible. "And you do not guide me, at least, beloved Marion. Remember that." 

Grantaire looked up from his glass at Combeferre, eye cocked, half in bewilderment and half in admiration. "_Pardieu_, I do not, do I? Why thank you, dearest René, for painting me as a figurehead and throwing me out on the cross like that unfortunate Jew. Whether that makes you Judas or the Magdalene in this delightful theatre, I've not the wit to tell. Enjolras, I think, must needs be St. Peter. You will hear him deny me after the gibbet makes a good man out of me, as it must." 

"No," said Combeferre, shaking his head. "I protest that he must be John, the disciple whom Jesus loved." 

Grantaire's face clouded a little. "Perhaps." he muttered over another gulp. 

Combeferre put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Not so melancholic now, _mon cher_. What is important? You saw him tonight. You've won his heart again, you have. He is yours." 

"Yes, that is true," said Grantaire solemnly, empty bottle pressed between his enormous hands and brow lined in thought. "Well, then." He looked up once more at Combeferre's steady visage and, charmed, kissed the smile that hung there. "But it is time to go home now, eh?" 

His friend nodded, and that is what they did; the lieutenant leading the dropped Capitaine back up to the cliff's edge.


	4. The Grandeur of despair

IV. The Grandeur of Despair 

Grantaire did not go to General Lamarque's funeral. 

The day was as black as the capitaine's soul felt when he woke, cold and alone, although he dimly recognized the bed and flat as Combeferre's. He was creature of complex troubles and simple pleasures. Grantaire had dressed slowly, not eager to sally forth into the ominous gloom and damp of this day, and all the more eager to take shelter from it once he had left the flat. For this purpose, the delightful smell of an excellent brie selected for him the wine shop in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the Corinth. Already cheered by this happy fortune, the libertine leader was even more delighted to discover therein Joly and Bossuet, sharing oysters, a baguette, and the beginnings of a cold made worse by the beginnings of a storm outside. Plied with food and wine, the couple greeted most amiably their Capitaine. Grantaire nearly forgot the foul foreboding he'd experienced upon waking in their singular bohemian gaiety. 

This most pleasant breakfast-party, nevertheless, was fated to endure two significant interruptions. The first arrived in the form of a gamin, a friend of one of the little hangers-on named Gavroche. He had a message from, ostensibly, Enjolras-- some ridiculous bit of code Grantaire vaguely remembered Combeferre mentioning, almost passively, that meant Lamarque's funeral was now in progress. This unwelcome intrusion, though it earned an instinctive guffaw, had the side effect of nearly marring his newfound pleasant levity with the weighty business of revolution. Joly and Bossuet were tempted in spite of the rain. Their Capitaine stopped them from such foolishness with a word and a glance. 

"I'll not interrupt my good breakfast to take part in the state-sanctioned puppet show the King will make out of the death of our Hero. I prefer Punch. Here gamin, go take in a show." And he tossed the boy a louis. 

The urchin flashed them all a gap-toothed grin and disappeared into the street, shouting, "Death to Polignac!" Grantaire groaned. 

The consumptive and the bald L'aigle de Meaux were too busy nodding at his back-pocket wisdom to notice this, however, and were all too pleased to resume their breakfast, with mounting jocularity. Grantaire, already two and a half bottles in the pale, chimed in with a secret desperation seeking to outreach the re-awoken gloom spreading up from his depths. 

Several hours and bottles later, Grantaire, Joly, and Bossuet were roused from their stupor by a fantastic sort of procession in the street. Grantaire, intoxicated to the point of joviality, looked up and blanched quickly. It was Enjolras, brilliant and flashing, a sudden burst of the sun in the almost night colored sky, leading a column of insurgents, and Combeferre among them. They had weapons of an amazing sort of variety all, and brandished them wildly. The spectacle would have been amusing in a stage melodrama, but here it shocked Grantaire suddenly sober. He sprang up, wheeling into the Rue de la Chanvrerie amid shouts from the hypochondriac and the Eagle of Meaux. 

"Where are you going?" Grantaire demanded of the procession, the head of which screeched to a halt at his voice and turned a little ways into the street. 

"There is a riot," said Combeferre mildly. 

"To make a barricade!" shouted Enjolras, wild with excitement. "They've rallied at Saint-Merry."

Grantaire bit his tongue, thinking quickly. The swell of some fifty to a hundred or devil-may-care faces behind the leaders stirred like the anticipatory trampings of a cavalry charge. In a heartbeat, and with an inward curse, he grabbed Enjolras' arm and exclaimed, "Let's make it here! This is a good place for a barricade." 

"Hear hear!" shouted Joly, more sober, but still congested. He had come out to greet their friends despite his phobia of the weather. Enjolras smiled, and at a signal from Combeferre; the great ferocious band rushed into the Rue de la Chanvrerie. 

In the tumult, Grantaire had not let go of Enjolras' arm. The fevered firebrand discovered this in his feeble attempt to help the builders in their preliminary destruction. In his bright intoxication, it took him a moment to register fully the deep and furious scowl that distorted Grantaire's grotesque features almost to the point of humanity. 

"It is done then," Grantaire seethed, half in fury, half in terror. "I hope you like a bed of oak as much as a mattress, _petit_. Tell Combeferre I shall be in the cellar. Getting drunker." He released Enjolras' arm almost harshly, stalking into the wine shop past the hysterical Madame Hucheloup, who was wailing in an agony that served well to augment the birth-pains of the Barricade. As for the poor, bewildered Enjolras, he stared at the hulking afterimage of his Capitaine Grandeur until a hand on his shoulder startled him out of it. 

"Enjolras. Come on, give us a hand with these barrels. We've still got to block off the Rue Mondetour." Enjolras turned his unreadable gaze on Combeferre, who sighed. "Don't worry about it, Enjolras. It will pass." 

"Today?" snapped Enjolras, "Or tomorrow?" 

"There will be one." Combeferre said quietly. Enjolras had already disappeared behind the wineshop, into the Rue Mondetour. 


	5. Dawn begins to gather over Grandeur

V. Dawn Gathers over Grandeur 

Higher than a man, the barricade soon loomed above the street, a monument to its creators' ability to destroy. Once the structure was completed, the insurgents found ways to busy themselves: making shells and cartridges from powder and molten iron; making lint and bandages; and shoring up the smaller barricade in the Rue Mondetour. Some of the others gathered together in small groups to sing or recite poetry, with the quiet gaiety of the soldier, when they were not fighting.

Combeferre took it upon himself to catalogue their supplies and stockpiles. He found Grantaire in the basement, ably consuming the day's ration of wine and cognac. And making a terrible nuisance of himself, thought Combeferre, as he attempted to complete his census. 

"Twenty-four bottles." 

"Twenty-three." 

"Twenty-three." 

"Twenty-two and a half. Twenty-two." 

"_Par diable_, Marion!" The agitated doctor smacked his ledger. "Will you not desist?" 

"Oh soon, soon enough, _mon cher_. I shall be finished within the hour, after which neither bottles nor catalogues will matter, for we shall all be dead. I pour the funeral libation in anticipation!" So saying, he upended the remaining-half bottle onto the floor. 

"I surrender!" Combeferre threw up his hands and turned to leave. 

"Wise words!" Grantaire called after him, "Remember them for the all too nearby future!" 

"Ah!" cried Combeferre, as he nearly collided with young Enjolras, who was heading down. "Perhaps you can reason with that great Cask down there, Adrien, for I swear to you that I am beaten." The grim laughter of the fool on the edge of the precipice followed him out into the tavern. Enjolras blinked and descended, his face furrowed with concern to see what diabolic state his Grandeur gloried in so wantonly. 

"How now, _petit_? Come here, I am having a wake, and it is for you, as much as me. _Avant_!" Enjolras did come closer, and, after a moments intimacy with the mouth of the handiest bottle, the drunken demagogue leaned forward to practice a similar intimacy upon the mouth of Enjolras. Enjolras rebuffed him angrily. Grantaire admired the display of divine fury for a moment or two: the wild, golden aureole and excellent jaw working furiously while the demi-god searched for verbs and adjectives appropriate to his perfect wrath. Grantaire just smiled. "Ah, Adrien, say nothing. Words are my element, this has always been the trouble. Grandiose and pretty, they tumble as easily from my mouth as from the mad apostle on the isle of Patmos. I've described loftily Trumpets and Archangels, plagues, locusts, scarlet whores. _Mais, mon cher_, I am but a lamb with the voice of a lion, and as much of a leader as any of these other sheep." 

"What do you mean to say?" Enjolras narrowed his eyes. Grantaire chuckled. 

"What, thou, who hath interpreted my most far-flung ephemerality, backed staunchly by the weight of wind and nothing -- thou canst not catch my meaning now, petit? Then, in faith, I shall for once in my life be plain. I lied to you, Enjolras. Grandeur," he grinned horridly, "is a delusion. And for this delusion shall he die, because when a flurry of idle dreamers deigned to take him seriously, he was too intoxicated by the worship on one of them to desist. And so shall they all follow him into hell. How is that?" He laughed the unkind laugh of a stormcrow witnessing the advent of its own fell prophecy. 

Enjolras stared, speechless once more, and Grantaire no longer felt like talking. He commiserated instead with the open bottle. After a moment, incensed, the firebrand snatched the bottle from the laconic drunkard's hand. The latter watched with an impressed chuckle as the former tried not to wince or choke on the liquor, and mostly succeeded. 

"I do not understand you!" Enjolras shouted, finally. "Have I done something? Do you not want me anymore?"

"What?" Grantaire spluttered, sitting up so fast it made his head spin. 

"You're trying to drive me away. Why?" 

Gaping, Grantaire sought to answer that frowning fairness. "Enjolras, Adrien, what I'm most certainly not doing --" 

"Grandeur, stop." The sudden raised hand had a most devastating effect upon Grantaire. He was powerless to do anything save obey. Enjolras continued. "You know, if you don't want me, well, I am no one important. I'm one soldier in the most desperate army, and I don't matter, next to -- don't interrupt." He sighed with frustration, eyes flashing as he rounded angrily upon Grantaire's feeble protests. "You can hate me all you wish, but for God's sake, don't take it out on the Republic!"

"Adrien, for once in my life, I am speaking the truth. Is that not the prerogative of a dying man? We've a foot in the grave, little Enjolras, little disciple, and the reason has as little enough to do with your Republic. It is because of my weakness in your grace."

"We have a foot in a grave, but it is a grave illuminated by the dawn. A vision cherished in each of our hearts, but which you in truth gave us eyes to see. Grantaire." He put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, "It is all right to be afraid of death. I hate it. But we who die here die in the radiance of the future, and death -- remember? You said it yourself: death is necessary for the..." 

"... the advent of new life." Grantaire murmured miserably. 

"You persist in this melancholy madness." Enjolras shook him. "You know that I believe in you." 

"What? You cannot! You are dreaming, and it is nightmarish. You, you're not real. You're part of my nightmare. You are incapable of belief, of thought, of will, of life, and of death." 

"You'll see," replied Enjolras, in a voice soft and cold as the very grave of which they had spoken. Enjolras folded his arms and prepared to stand sentinel between Grantaire and the rest of the wine. The unwilling Orestes sighed. 

"After the next act of this farce." He growled, rose, and stalked back up into the fog. 


	6. What Horizon can be seen from the Depths

VI. What Horizon Can Be Seen From the Depths of a Barricade

Presently, from the direction of St Denis, there arrived simultaneously a gamin and a lookout.

"They're coming! My musket!" cried the gamin.

"To arms!" cried Enjolras. Grantaire, silent and thoughtful, handed his shotgun to little Gavroche, who crowed. Then footsteps, heavy and ominous, sounded from the direction of St-Leu. Solemnity fell over each man like an axe as he crouched in his position for the combat, all seventy-to-a-hundred of them. Even Grantaire could not suppress a caught breath at the wild excitement in the eyes of Combeferre, and of Enjolras. He was also excited, but he ignored that quickly. The mists beyond the barricade seemed to gleam unnervingly now, shimmering every so often like rain frozen vertically against the sky. It was the glint of muskets and bayonets in dim torchlight. There was a collective shiver on the part of the insurgents and then, even more chilling, from the depths of the brouillard came a deep, disembodied voice like a fatal spirit.

"Who goes there?" cried the fog.

"The Boston Tea Party!" cried Grantaire. "Would you like a cup?"

"Fire!" shouted the fog.

"Duck!" shouted Grantaire, diving to safety behind the barricade. Paralyzed by the force of the command, the rest of the insurgents followed suit, hardly needing his cursory, "For god's sake, hold your fire!" until the end of the opposing volley. The ensuing silence, but for the monotony of the city wide drum roll, was total. Grantaire picked himself up gingerly, examining his flock, still, scared, and expectant. Combeferre watched him curiously. Enjolras was aghast, his mouth hanging open - he could shut that soon enough. For now, Grantaire was in his element: expectation. The waiting of the sheep and the wolves on the other side; the tension of the drum roll and the cumulative caught breath for news of any of the other barricades carried him up the side of the barricade, to the point where his head could be seen from the other side, and his voice would carry both to friend and foe. The insurgents rustled a little, eagerly. They knew him, as the National Guard did not. So they believed, anyway, thought Grantaire with a bemused smile that faded soon into a ferocious seriousness, as he opened his mouth to address the fog, here and there.

"Citizens," his voice rolled like distant thunder, "do you imagine the future? Naturally. But ask yourselves, can you see the past? Can you see the spectral 1830 and 1822 cringing in the lengthening shadows of dusk, ill because there is nothing so painful than Yesterday's fallacies in the mouths of Today, silent because Today is holding a musket.

"Imagine the future; look at the past. Do you hear how the streets are quiet today; your mothers, sisters, and mistresses say, 'He is not come home!' and they cry. They do not think nor suspect nor say, 'Oh, he has gone to market to buy me a future.' No, they think, they suspect, they moan that you are past, and they weep for days that are long ago and dead, and will stretch on forever in complacency and dust. Tomorrow when the newspapers are opened, there will be a shaken head to mark the fifth and probably the sixth days of June, punctuated with sighing reminiscences of yesterday: remember the Sun King, remember L'Aiglon, long live the Pear! One after the other, the people you long to liberate turn their backs on the radiance of the cockade to kneel before splendor of a crown. Voila, they fall to their knees, as a sailor shipwrecked, they grovel in the dust of antiquity and kiss the cracking bones of things dead as if they were new come home. They pale at terror and mean our faces; they plug up their ears to our voices. "_Morte a la Morte_!" means us. And truly, we are a half-step away from a yawning grave all shrouded with the night. Be glad of this! That shroud, which is called _L'avinier_, will be pulled over our still-warm bodies with an embarrassed expression. Paris shall sigh to the markets in the morning, grumbling over the prices of bread and brie.

"Comrades, they know what they want. Our people, our Paris: it is to be left alone.

"The same for the army, there yonder, your more prudent fathers and brothers with the muskets and the nonentity of the National Guard's frock. They wait and they hold their guns at attention and they sigh at us. You see that General there? He is some dusty old relic of the Empire; he grumbles with the Masons, sympathetic but unwilling, right now, he could be in bed with his wife or his mistress, but no. Some rabble has started a row in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, or the Cloitre Saint-Merry, or Faubourg Saint-Antoine, or somewhere that way. I feel deeply for this old man. He flew once on the wings of an eagle, and now makes his home in a falconer's mews, bowing to the commands of old buzzards. Despise him not. He is feeding his family, albeit on the bones of his sons instead of the blood of the English. For that is what weighs truly on his mind and all of France, my friends: what shall we have for dinner, lamb or pork?

"Ah, ah, but when the King falls, when the Empire falls, when the barricade falls, there is still dinner must needs be got on the table. There are pipes to be sucked and wine to be drunk; the bowels must move and a man must have his hour of sleep. Your landlady will forgive rent to a dead man if she can let your room to someone else, and at a better rate!

"You say, 'Throw out the unjust law; down with tyrannical rule!' But I say the laws of nature are unjust, and life is a tyrant. Your mistress infuriates you, you spend your passion in an emeuté; you do not want to work for a living, you fight till you die. Well, there's nothing wrong with that! The Earth shall not be free, non, but these dreamers shall be free of it, and we shall have given Notre Dame, our Paris a night she will remember, if only because she cannot forget, and ultimately it is an embarrassment."

The silence endured for some minutes after the leader of the insurgents shut his mouth. Through the fog, General Honoré Reille, commanding officer of the unit assigned to this particular neighborhood, regarded the bobbing, dark head of the speechifying lout over the top of the barricade with an expression of mingled exasperation and something unreadable. Frowning suddenly, ostensibly at the uncomfortable damp, he tugged his woolen coat closer about him. Behind him, he could feel the nervous tension in his troops, waiting for their orders. Their fidgeting irritated him only slightly less than the incessant droning of the drum roll that echoed throughout Paris. Really, when he figured out just whose bright idea it was to equip the military with such infernal instruments... He closed his eyes, gritting his teeth, until he felt a light tapping on his shoulder. It was his aide- a skinny, freckled sergeant who would really have been more in place on the other side of the bloody contraption. Honoré found his surreptitious throatclearing marginally preferable to the drums.

"What is it, sergeant?" He tried to keep most of his ire out of his voice, and almost succeeded. The sergeant flinched anyway.

"General Reille, that fellow, the one who was speaking. I know him. Know of him, anyway." He added the last hurriedly, and Honoré sighed, quirking an eyebrow.

"Oh? Who is he?"

The sergeant fumbled in his jacket, retrieving a dog-eared pamphlet that made Honoré blink. He'd seen such a thing before; Elza had tried to show such a paper to him the other day. She had been crowing about it, in fact. He'd gathered it was some friend of her young ex-lover the newspaper publisher - a bad association there. Because of him, Honoré was possessed of an instinctive dislike of hot-blooded young republicans- at least, ones in publishing. Attempts on one's life and reputation tend to do that, especially when the matter concerns a woman. Honoré had had a highly colored view of the situation, and so he had only paid a token amount of attention to the paper. He took it now, flipped through and matched the unmistakable voice of the pretentiously named 'Grandeur' with that of the impudent young babbler still holding his breath on the barricade. He cursed intelligibly under his breath, and the sergeant blinked his big blue eyes.

"Sir?"

"What?" Honoré couldn't keep the snap out of his voice. The poor sergeant practically yelped, and his commander sighed once more. "Hand me the horn, sergeant."

"Yes, sir." The boy scurried away, fetched the instrument, came back, and handed it to Honoré. "If I may ask, general, what are you going to do?"

"Damned if I know," Honoré muttered, half to himself, and raised the horn to his lips.

The other side of the barricade startled as if out of a strange sleep as the general's voice issued suddenly through the soup of the fog.

"You! Young idiot! I'd like a word with you."

"A trap!" Enjolras whispered hoarsely into Grantaire's ear.

Grantaire responded with a withering glance, and shouted, brightly, back at Honoré, "Certainly, old fool! Pray tell, your place or mine?" Grantaire stifled a near-giggle, both at the shocked drop of Enjolras' jaw and the confused blinking he envisioned on the face of the opposing general. After a moment, there came some inaudible scruffling and a very distinct, "What?" through the horn. Grantaire chuckled again.

"I mean to say, general, shall you come back here, where we, through the good fortune of having barricaded a wine shop, have brie and oysters and some excellent wine; or shall I sortie unto you, where waits nothing so attractive save a regiment of bayonets and all that lovely cannon?"

The sergeant, whose name, Honoré remembered finally, was Chauvert or something like it, turned to him in wide eyed alarm.

"Do you suppose it's a trap?"

Honoré sighed. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he swore he could smell the most delicious odor of brie wafting over the barricade, as if it were baking. His stomach growled in response. Not at all sure of himself, but hardly about to let that show, he shook his head at his aide.

"I don't think it is. You don't have to come if you don't want." He signaled to the troops to lower their weapons. Chauvert gaped, but scurried along behind him, eager to show his mettle before his commanding officer. Some ten or so others, along with the rather obvious general in his uniform with the full epaulets, could soon be seen approaching the barricade through the mists. Grantaire bounded towards the gap between the barricade and the buildings; but his arm and attention were arrested mid-leap by young Enjolras, fury burning beautifully in his azure eyes.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he hissed, gesturing both towards the gap and towards the tavern, from which, sure enough, the odor of warm melting cheese was rumbling every belly in the barricade. "We're supposed to be fighting the monarchists, not feeding them! Damn it, Marion -"

Grantaire smiled sweetly and kissed him on the flaring nostrils. "I am seducing the National Guard, _petit_. It worked well enough with you." With a wink, Grandeur sauntered off to greet his guests, leaving Enjolras to splutter and stare.


	7. Enchantments and Dissembling

"_Bonsoir_, good master relic." 

General Reille blinked repeatedly at the sorry spectacle before him. Even after the creature had straightened from its ridiculously foppish bow, matters had not improved. The monstrosity came barely up to Honoré's chest, though it was broad enough to swallow perhaps three of him whole, were he properly folded. Its face, misshapen and hinting at demonic ancestry, peered up at him with an expression bred illegitimately between a leer and a grimace. This could not possibly be the one. It spoke to him again, in a human voice. 

"I humbly bid you and your cortège welcome to the Corinth wineshop. No doubt you are familiar with her of happier days. I am afraid, however, that you may find the decor somewhat altered, and the ambiance... ah, not what it used to be."

Honoré nodded absently. If he and his friends had ever visited this place, particularly in their youth... well, the current state of the furnishings would little distress him, and might even seem familiar. Nevertheless, overcoming his initial shock at the toadish appearance of the ill-named 'Grandeur', Honoré; favored the creature with a condescending smile. 

"Well well, _mon fils_." He surveyed from his superior height the people of the barricade, who stood gaping at him and his formal band of guardsmen. "I have come."

"So you have!" The little ogre chirped cheerily, "This way, old man." 

And Honoré followed, motioning to his rather alarmed looking companions to remain behind. 

"After you, my good General." The monstrosity bowed with surprising elegance. Honoré stooped through the door of the tavern with enough grace to make it look something like a bow in return. 

"Merci." 

There was, in fact, very little furniture left in the Corinth-- a small table and a couple of stools with broken backs. This Grandeur found a half bottle of port wine and two acceptable bottles of _vin du pays_, kissed them reverently and placed them on the table. 

"Headquarters of the revolution." He grinned. "So, what do you want to talk about, my dear old coot?" 

"My name is General-Count Honoré Charles Reille, _mon enfant_." He stopped himself just short of adding 'terrible' to that, and sat, stiffly, upon one of the stools. The ugly boy laughed loudly and straddled the other, opposite.

"That's a mouthful. Do you have it thus embroidered on your luggage? Mine is General Menace, Marion Grantaire, or any of my apparently more popular sobriquets, which you may or may not know."

Honoré repressed a snort, being far too diplomatic for that sort of thing in this situation, and otherwise not inclined to banter with dangerous animals. Instead, he searched for the best way to begin at the bottom of the bottle of port. It was not there. He improvised. 

"You know, don't you, that you're all going to get yourselves killed?" 

"Oh yes." This Marion Grantaire nodded like a Punch doll, "I realise also, that you and your men, dear Uncle, shall do us the honor-- eh, no pun intended-- of being our executioners. But Our Lord fed his betrayer; I feel no dis-ease in supplying the refreshments." At this point, the baking Brie whose delicious odor had been tickling Honoré's nose ever since he'd entered the barricade made its appearance, borne by a trembling old woman who probably, really belonged here. She cast a desperately hopeful look at Honoré, but he did not encourage her. 

"As you wish." He said to Grantaire, realising to his dismay that not only was he now not hungry, his stomach felt decidedly ill at ease. To settle it, he took another swig of the good-- nay, excellent-- liquor. "But never mind that. I'd rather _not_ have to shoot you, you know."

"Then don't, _mon ami_."

Honoré frowned, startled. "Well! It's just not so simple as that."

"Why not?"

"Goddammit boy, will you shut up and sit still a moment so I can explain?"

Grantaire leaned back in his chair with a conciliatory gesture and a slice of Brie. 

"As you wish, _mon cher General_." Honoré nodded authoritatively, "That's better," Then paused to consider just what it was he wanted to say now. The expression of the boy across from him seemed to dissolve into still deeper depths of unnerving, so Honoré found in the port bottle the double benefit of something to fill his mouth and occupy his gaze. He discovered between swallows, if not inspiration, at least a place to begin. 

"You're outnumbered," He stated the obvious, "outnumbered and outgunned. For every man you shoot, I can have ten. Now, you are French and I am French. Surely, to surrender would be more sensible, given those unfortunate odds." 

Grantaire looked at him a moment, then laughed. 

"This will be a slaughter." He said, "Answer me something. You have seen the men I have gathered here about me. Did you expect so many? And this is only one barricade of-- how many, do you think, can have sprung up already? This will not be the game of corner-and-swat that you have anticipated, no, not at all." 

"Still! You can't possibly win!" Honoré drank swiftly, trusting in his substantial length to dilute the effects of his alcohol, ambivalently desired. 

"No. _you_ are the ones who cannot win. We can only die-- but it will be with honor. And you will kill without even that. 

"Let me say a little about you, friend Relic. You're an Imperial as I guessed, _n'cest pas_? I am certain you slaughtered your share of little boys, in Spain or in Russia, under your command or under your saber. So I will not appeal to you on that front. But tell me if it is better to march into battle for nothing but a man; in faith, to be a _conqueror_," He spat the word with great vehemence, "Or for something, an Idea? Do you think it ignoble to believe in a thing, which you yourself cannot deny is right, and to fight for it? This is the siren call that has drawn my sanguine command to dash themselves upon the jagged points of your bayonets. Can you say that it is any less reasonable than the way you allowed to the songs of your youth to carry you to Marengo, to Moscow?" 

"Spain," Said Honoré, between teeth clenched on a molten lump of flaky brie. "I, ah, missed out on Moscow. Wounded." 

"_Quelle dommage_," Murmured the hood-eyed goblin, "General-Count, did you say? So what were you? An aristo, like Grouchy, a hot-blooded peasant, like Lannes, or the son of a Jewish wine-merchant, like Massena?" 

"I am the first count Reille." said Honoré, neither wanting to get into discussions of his childhood, nor that of his father-in-law, Massena, with this presumptuous brat. 

"I see." It smirked horribly. "Count Reille, the _First_ Count Reille-- the Created Count. How very like Bonaparte-- put a rifle in the hands of a stripling young man. If he survives, call him a Baron; if he is wounded in the process, create him a Count." 

So as not to snap overmuch at this fresh audacity off of this ruffian's unbridled tongue, Honoré stuffed a slice of brie into his mouth and chomped down on it furiously. If nothing else, his repeated outrage was at least getting him full-- and just the slightest bit tiddled, to be honest. But being a very tall man, He was far less susceptible than he suspected Grantaire realised, at least yet. He smirked back at him. 

"All very well for you to say, _mon enfant_, but it is better than being some pampered son of wealthy bourgeoisie, who has gained his little notoriety through being a loudmouth, rather than honorably. You go to the university, learn a little law, and now you think you know how to govern a country _and_ marshal an army! For starters, yes, I do see that you have many more men than first suspected by my commanders. And now you've closed them up in a corner, rounded them up, already, ready for the peacekeepers to come in and clean up!" 

"Touché," Grantaire placed his hand over his heart, "But no shot has yet been fired, my tutor of the _Ancien Regime_. Instruct me then. How would you marshal us?"

Honoré opened his mouth to do just that, then shut it again, realising how he'd very nearly fallen for it. 

"You..." He shook his head at the table, voice warmed a bit by wine and expression astounded, "you are a remarkable chimera! Though god knows you haven't seduced all these fiery imbeciles with your charming looks." 

The grotesque opposite laughed, softly on Honoré's ears. 

"Hardly that, mon general. But if you mean that this situation was my doing, you are also mistaken. Sibilant shadows dancing to well crafted soap bubbles and jar-serpents of a talented illusionist-- is that what you think of my men? It has a pretty sound to it, if I say so myself, but it is just noise. I know about noise. I can make it until I am blue in the face--" 

"And be much improved by that!" Honoré snorted over the bottle, though ignored by Grantaire. 

"--but it would not matter if what's out there were not something monstrous of it's own. You think my face is horrible to look upon-- I can't deny it. But imagine, if you will, my prettier Count Reille, the enormity of a horror which compels men to look towards just such a face for hope!" 

"I am aware," Confessed Honoré carefully, "Of the rather splendid blunders committed by the current regime. Forgive me if I'm not an advocate of bloodshed." 

"Out from under your old mad eagle's wings, nay not." 

"I didn't have to fight Frenchmen!" 

"You are fighting Frenchmen now." 

"Rebels!" 

"Against a regime that you, unless I have read you wrong, do not care for." 

"But one that I am not willing to commit the crime of murder against." 

"Only for." 

"The Devil take you!" 

All seven feet of General-Count Reille sprang vertical, but Grantaire did not rise, save for an amused eyebrow. 

"You wish to argue, I see, but cannot refute." 

"You are wrong!" Honoré roared, his mind whirling far too fast and futilely to articulate more than that. 

"But we are here," Grantaire said, and moved not, "And the both of us wish, I am certain, very badly to be _not_ here. Will you agree with me on that point, at least?" 

"On that? The Devil, I must." Honoré collapsed once more into his chair, and Grantaire leaned forward.

"And might I point out, _mon cher General_, that no one of you, nor of us, has yet been murdered by either side, and that you and I are having a perfectly friendly conversation. Would you agree with me on that point also?" 

Although neither perfect nor friendly were terms that sprang immediately to Reille's mind, out loud he supposed that this, also, was true. 

"In that case, _mon ami_, perhaps we can swiftly come to some arrangement that will see the both of us warm in our respective beds soon enough. I am coming to see a plan..." 

Honoré leaned forward, very interested in what his hobgoblin had to say now, but at that moment the flaxen-haired, effeminate youth in the Robespierre waistcoat came panting into the tavern. 

"Grandeur! They're calling for their..." His pretty face took on a very un-cute expression as he took in the spectacle of the barmy captain, the tipsy general, and the decimated platter of brie between them. Grantaire smiled at him with infinite tenderness. 

"_Cher_ Adrien. You may tell the restless party that my good friend General-Count Reille will be with them momentarily." 

"They want to hear it from him." Enjolras jerked his head towards the General, who grunted irritably. 

"Oh hell." He heaved himself upward, discreetly tested his feet for balance, found them firm, and properly stood. "I'll go talk to them." 

"Of course!" Grantaire hopped up and slipped his arm in Honoré's. Honoré blinked the considerable distance down to the hideous grin aimed up at him, and frowned, though there was no malice in it. 

"You know, boy, I certainly hope you know what we're doing." 

"Do you." Grantaire's face seemed neither troubled nor dizzy, though Reille himself experienced a distinct vertigo. 

"Hell!" He repeated, and the pair of them lurched towards the door, scowling adherent trailing behind. 


	8. The Flag, act I

Even through his rather benign drunk, Honoré could sense the increased tension in the little barricade and beyond. The long roll, which had been muted in the tavern, rat-a-tatted inside his head with renewed vigor. Shots could be heard intermittently, but distantly. Young Chauvert and the rest of Honor's entourage sat with their hands on their knees between two wry, but unhappy looking insurgents. Their expressions seemed unsure, as did that of the guardsmen, whether they were guarding the soldiers as prisoners or protecting them from their fellows. Honoré rolled up to him, seized the trumpet from his astonished hands and barked, "Now hear this," across the barricade. 

"It is General Reille?" A general murmur rose on the other side, which generally increased General Reille's general headache. 

"That's right. Pay close attention, _mes enfants_. We're going to withdraw from this conflict, but now. Prepare the retreat, and wait for my next order." 

Enjolras seized Grantaire's sleeve, hissing into his ear, "What are they doing? This totally defeats us!" 

"What are we to do, go home?" Asked another of the insurgents, incredulously. 

"Wait for another pack of wolves to not attack us?" shouted another. Grandeur gave Adrien a dulcet, obliging expression, patted him on the rear-end, and strode up to Honoré. Without any preface he seized the general by the sleeve and half-hauled him bodily up the face of the barricade. Honor's unit, which, far from packing up, had only raised their weapons a the noise, lowered them upon spying their General, who stood even taller than the flag atop the barricade. They half-raised them again upon spying the infamous Capitaine Grandeur, but he faced his back to their muskets and cannon, thus confounding everyone, including Honoré. 

"There will be blood. Of that, dear friends, I will assure you. Your ardor has not been rashly nor impotently stoked! But I ask you-- all of you-- whose blood shall it be? Should it be that of this bald eagle here--" to the insurgents it seemed that Grandeur meant the pale-pated Bossuet, while the attackers thought he meant the distinguished general beside him "--or shall it be mine, or yours? None of these, I say to you! For more than men, and other, shall die today. And you, men of arms, men of parts, of faith and of freedom, of bright ideals and exalted goals, will you begin this transformation with murder?" There were murmurings, but no answers. Response was not possible while Grandeur wove his magic of words over both sides. Honoré alone cocked an eyebrow at him, but likewise remained silent. Grantaire continued. 

"Here, men of the barricade; look upon your uncles and despise them not! Men of the uniform, look upon your sons here standing and sweating and do not chide them! We are an oasis of reason in a desert city, mad and in hiding: the shops closed and boarded with fear as the streets are barricaded with hope. This fear is the death of us all, and the peacekeepers' cannon is no less mad than the insurgent rifle or the citizen-subject in abject silence! The only sanity is before you, in the form of frank discussion and clear ideas, and the questions which all men given the luxury of reason must ponder: what is more important, to be comfortable, or to be free? 

I say there may be both monsieurs, but to attain the one you must risk the other. Today is the shadow-world made visible, the eternal battle of whore in the street and cutthroat in the alley. You, the content, have been content to ignore it, for it has been out of your sight. You are informed, you read the papers: These cannot read. You go home to your bed, these lay their heads on the newspapers you discarded in the afternoon. And why not? What is a mugging in the street, an occasional robbery, the fallen woman: it is the emeuté in miniature, it is injustice turning to criminality and chased by the law, it is the dog being eaten by the bitch who spawned it. Those are jobs for the police, this is a job for the Guard: but they are the same job, of that you may be sure. 

I said before there would be blood, and now I will tell you why: because there are still men who are hungry. A man kept hungry is an animal, his thought is consumed with eating, and there can be no more until he is fed. 

And what does an animal do when he is hungry? He kills. 

But let me face you this puzzle: What does a woman do when she is hungry? What does a child? 

The answer to the first may be found in the brothels of the Rue D'esperisons, a clue to the latter in forgotten graves, the gutters and the sewers, and in the faces of the Gamins here standing with muskets." He indicated Gavroche, who found himself, on his side of the fracas, regarded with a new horror, "but one day he must grow up, and learns he may, by strength alone, knock down a man and put a knife to his throat. And if today is not the death of him, or else the rebirth of him so it must be." 

Gavroche would have cried out in protest at this, save that something in him was struck by it to his swift-beating sparrow's heart, and that Enjolras put a hand on his shoulder. The silence was utter, save the roll, and Grantaire's voice took on that sort of quiet that carries to every corner. He addressed the Army side of the barricade now. 

"So shall we kill for him, my friends, we who are not hungry, you and I? Yes, we shall indeed. With light we shall slice through this damnable fog, and with grim resolve we shall murder madness in it's rampaging tracks, through the boulevards and alleys, all the way to the Palais. It is the illusion of Kingship, that old withered man with his battered tin sword which dies today, from sickness, yea, not the louisette! Why bother? Why does the mirage of the king exist? To perpetuate the illusion of the serf. Remember that another man wields power over you only because he has convinced you that you have none, and that is all. You have waited long enough for someone else to dispel this daydream for you. No more delays, no more waiting. Let us gather together, and go." 

A great cheer rose from the insurgent side of the barricade, and a little from the army, though these were largely silent out of a deep and stunned shame. 

"What says our General?" cried out one of them clearly, a large blond with hair in a generous mop, standing at the back of one of those diabolical cannon. 

Honoré, shaking off his own transfixed despair, shrugged. 

"You too are men of Paris-- Citizens, as it were-- and I'll admit that we are in the midst of a genuine fracas. For my own part, I feel compelled not to fire upon these brave boys, nor am I inclined to order you to do so. I believe what Monsieur Grandeur has said. Should my word not be enough for you, I submit it in the spirit of these fine Republican sympathies: let the matter be put to a Vote." 

This, in particular the emphasis on the last word, raised a cry of great acclaim and alarm. Men on both sides of the barricade were forcibly reminded of the Convention and it's fatal power, and saw that the matter here was no less grave, and no less fueled by overwhelming emotion. Great power was here to be seized, and permission had just been granted by one who was believed, popularly to have that authority! Honoré was rather pleased with himself. The move had served the double purpose of sympathizing himself with the greater Republican Ideal, in which he did believe at bottom, and of covering his tail. For, in the case of failure, he could honestly claim to have been overwhelmed by the majority. Grantaire realised this and was about to congratulate the General on his subtle prudence, when a shot fired from the side of the army. 


	9. The Flag, act II

Grantaire retained breath alone for a croaked gasp, and all at once slumped into Honor's arms. The bullet had gone through some as-yet unidentified portion of his upper body, as evidenced by the location of the blood. 

"HOLD!" cried Honoré, and his voice did not require a bullhorn to be heard by everyone on both sides of the barricade. "Whichever of you idiots fired, I will deal with you apace!" 

By the time he'd got his burden properly settled, propped against his knee, two insurgents had scaled the barricade to assist him. One was the devastatingly androgynous blond youth, with a look on his face that spelled death in richly illuminated letters. The other was a boy with light brown hair and glasses, lower than his companion and a little broader, a concerned expression in a face that hoped for life, albeit in script more subtle. But he had with him a doctor's bag, which made him infinitely more useful both in spirit and in reality than the murderous, if pretty blond. There was no doubt in Honor's mind that they and the rest of the barricade would kill for their leader. The Ogre was either deceived in this, or else more demoniacally clever than he had even appeared. Honoré conferred the leader's weight to this young man at once. As he did so, he heard the voice of his Sergeant, Chauvert, who had apparently discovered the culprit and was haranguing him mercilessly. 

"What were you thinking? You could have hit the General!" 

Honoré realised that he had not even considered this possibility. He had been too busy calculating his doom in so many other, more complex ways. He deeply appreciated Chauvert's head start on the idiot soldier; it would serve for a good warm up before Honoré got to him. The General turned his attention back to the brown haired insurgent and his paling patient. 

"The wound is in his side, and should not be fatal," he was telling the blond, wiping blood from his hands, "but it is embedded. He'll need real attention soon enough." 

The blond cursed eloquently, and there was fire in his eyes when he looked again at the great, looming General. "If he dies," The boy hissed, a sword at his side that had not seemed to be there a moment before, "your friends will have killed you." 

"Peace, Enjolras." The other boy looked up at Honoré too, with an expression that, for all it's mildness, was very disconcerting. 

"What will you do now, General?" 

The boy's words echoed the exact shape of General Reille's thoughts, although the gentle, painstakingly polite tone in which they had been openly uttered rankled his fur. He said nothing in reply, but instead made his way gingerly down the front of the barricade and strode-- in very few steps, considering his exceptionally long legs-- towards the one who had fired the unlucky shot. 

"Buffoon!" He snarled, albeit in a voice more weathered to exasperation than fury, "Cretin, Idiot! What on earth were you thinking? Didn't I tell you not to shoot!?" 

The culprit, a dirty blond and pock-marked corporal of near-middle age with his hair shagging in his eyes, winced at this new onslaught. 

"I thought you were in trouble, General, when you were saying that you felt _compelled_ and all... I thought you were trying to warn us. In code. That they'd got you hostage." 

Honoré was dumbfounded into temporary silence, but found his voice after a moment. "You, _mon enfant_, are guilty of the crime of being entirely too clever for your own good. Pray that Monsieur Grandeur is _not_ dead, or you will be held accountable for his murder." Honoré shook with anger, but also fear, a little. He believed the words of the boy Enjolras entirely, and he could feel the rising swell of blood-madness around him. That was the problem with the Republicans, he decided sourly: too many convincing speakers. 

As one, the unit realised that Honor's allegiance had shifted more or less utterly from the one pole to the other, and another cheer arose. Fortunately-- and not accidentally-- this coincided with a bandaged Grandeur, raising his dark and homely head above the peak of the barricade. He smiled-- half wince, but full of life-- and the roar of the army and the insurgents both obscured the long roll for a blessed time. 

It was during this partial reprieve that Honoré realised how completely he was undone. His corporal-- private, if he lived, Honoré swore-- and his over-paranoid action had left him with no option suitable to status as a Gentleman, soldier and human being than to take up in the event that Grandeur could not (provided that hot-headed blond didn't promptly execute him) and to go along at his side in any case. To do other wise would be to face as a liar, or at least, a plain coward. In this particular theatre, a coward was not a healthy or safe thing to be. Thus defeated by his own sense of honor-- and survival-- General Reille turned to face the barricade and raised his saber in salute. Grandeur saluted back, and Honoré confronted his men. 

"Do not look to me, _mes enfants_. We have heard talk of glory, let us now prove that we believe in it. We have heard speeches on freedom, now show that we love it. There is your General now. Let us follow him. And for God's sake, be careful of your weapons!" 

That was for the unfortunate corporal, who had been seized by his comrades and stripped of armament. 

Thusly another cry of sharper hue rose forth-- everyone's throat must by now be achingly sore!-- this time from the whole of the Chanvrerie as the two sides moved, met, and commingled as a many-bodied beast with a single head: the proud, if wounded Grandeur. 

"We march." He said most simply, and as they began to stream out briskly to infect the greater body of Paris, the long roll fell finally silent. 


	10. The excess of Grandeur's zeal

"I suppose you will be Le Comte Grandeur, at the end of this?"

Although he was not particularly in a joking mood, Honoré could not resist the jibe. Grantaire responded with a grimace of amused appreciation, though Combeferre and Enjolras, grim bodyguards at his flanks, aimed puzzled frowns at the both of them. On the whole they marched in silence; Reille, Grandeur, Combeferre and Enjolras in the fore, Chauvert, Honoré's remaining officers, and Grandeur's Lieutenants behind. They twice ran across a small group of guardsmen and pressed them into service through Grantaire's well-placed words and Reille's well-executed, officious silence. Thusly, it was a force of two hundred fifty or more that presented itself at the Saint-Merri Barricade, surrounding and surprising the men who assaulted it from the street.

"Soldiers of France! Lay down your arms." This was Honoré's line. Grantaire followed hard upon.

"It is I, Grandeur, Captain of the revolution who speaks to you now. Upon the stones lie dead of two sides, which are the same side. You murder you the wrong things. You soldiers, you old men: by killing your sons, you murder the future, you dash apart the dream and you piss on the ideal. Weep, O' fathers of France, and be ashamed! "And you, you insurgents, by shooting at your uncles you murder your credibility. You squander your power to change the world on a few moments heat; you bury your ambition beneath ashes and rubble and you spill out your promise in rivers of blood. You are each afraid of the other-- what you might have been and what you might become! Desist at once. To win the world, be ruled by me. It is always folly, is it not, to spend too quickly?"

There were nervous laughs at this, Grandeur continued.

"Come with me then; there are more seasoned ways to use this ardor, which I will show you."

"It is truly Grandeur!" Someone shouted in the silence that followed, a silence which admitted plainly that the shots had ceased. A cry arose from behind the barricade, and a man wearing the decorations of July 1830 upon his breast and a red cap upon his head sprang to the top of the construct.

"Hear the voice which speaks for a thousand bodies, here arrayed! I am the leader of this barricade and I say I will follow Grandeur!"

Another cheer and the commander of the attacking unit saw and sought out Honoré, salmon in color all through the face.

"General! What is the meaning of this!?"

"It means change, M. Delessert." Said Honoré mildly, recognising the man, "Crashing through like so many runaway elephants. A man may decide whether he wishes to be moved with it, or trampled under it."

"I know where you were at Waterloo!" Delessert growled.

"And so do I."

The other commander, realising that he had lost the advantage of numbers, of superior technology, and of authority all in one fell swoop took such knowledge like a man and forthwith surrendered his saber to Honoré. Honoré barely let it touch his fingers but long enough to pass it to Grandeur, who thrust it high into the air. The crowd en mass erupted into a kind of exultant mania, shouting his name and cheering: but Combeferre saw him wince, and knew his side still pained him.

Grandeur, on the other hand, in spite of the reflex, barely noticed the hurt. Gone was the sick self-awareness of his joke as he spoke now to these masses, replaced with a euphoria known hitherto only in the land of nod or the bed of some other delectable dream. He looked upon his growing force as from within the clouds, and he heard his own voice and was moved by it. The cool steel of M. Delessert's sword in his hand seduced him with its promise of victory and the faces all around, by their belief, touched in him the need to believe.

And when Charles Jeanne, that proud figure, that soldier with the decoration of 1830 on his jacket and the colors of 1832 on his cap, neither the less honourable than the other, when that worthy strode up to him and shook his hand and called him their Marechal, Grandeur was skyrocketed to the very heights alluded to by his nick-name, his eyes burning with a conviction that alarmed Combeferre and delighted Enjolras once more.

"Let us go then, friend Jeanne," He said to the other celebrated Captain, "And we will eat victory with our cake."

There was no doubt in any heart, even his own, that he meant these words.


	11. Peace, Supported to Death

It was soon morning. The barricades of the city were empty, and the streets were swarming. From a window above, in the hôtel of the addressed, Armand Carrel looked down with a smile.

"Marechal Clausel," He said to that worthy, "I do believe that you have your legion."

"The devil!" Clausel tried not to sound pleased and failed, "M. le Marquis (meaning Lafayette, of course) is fearless, but we expect this from him, and no one cares anymore. Who rallies these? I cannot imagine!"

Carrel smiled only, and it was this smile which would cause him and Armand Marrast, smug foxes of the newspaper world to go down erroneously as two of the premier architects of the nouveau revolution. As for Clausel, that noble figure who had so brashly made his famous promise, he cursed once more eloquently and with style, and no less aplomb, kept to it. At once he sounded out that remainder of the _Vieux Guarde_ Generals who were either recalled to Paris at the moment or were officially non-active, waking them to the restless spirits of the old ghosts they had so long served of Republic, and a little, of Empire.

In the streets, the affair had been largely bloodless. Grandeur had by this time gathered to his immediate cortege a proper panel of legitimate voices: Reille, Jeanne, and a general named Caudelac, once an Aide-de-Camp to absolute power, now content to be a knight for universal power. These personalities sufficed to preserve the peace for riled armies, and that of Grandeur served likewise to rouse them again, in the proper direction. By this time, Grandeur had begun to get a little hoarse and his breathing had grown laboured, a little, but that was the price of excitement. His fever aped fervor with terrible likeness; the people looked upon him and were inflamed, and were not afraid.

By the chiming of Matins-- or when Matins would have rung, on any other day-- Invalides was in revolutionary hands, likewise the Palais, and likewise the Assembly, though there was very little holding that in the first place. It was the arsenal at the Invalides which was important anyway, though there was little need for it until perhaps 8:30 or thereabouts. It was approximately this time that the lot converged upon the Hôtel de Ville à Paris, where the Citizen King huddled in his offices with his ministers, none of whom were particularly emboldened. The premier viper in his den was Prince Klemens von Metternich, that old poisoner, who spread his venom equally in the ear of Louis-Phillipe as in the cup of Reichstadt. Antidotal to Metternich's poison was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been carried in not long before when the unrest proved unlikely to quiet. Having spied Grandeur at the head of the mob earlier and known him by his words, he would be later quoted to say:

"Yes, I saw that man; such was his look that I almost thought to offer him my chair, poor lad. But I think he would have refused. I rather admired him."

In the Hôtel de Ville, other quite quotable phrases were being uttered.

"You have been called Kingmaker," Metternich was saying to the Marquis, "Now you would dethrone the very man you crowned, but two years ago!"

"It is never the man," said Lafayette with a thin smile, "it is the will of the people. I do not make kings, I remind them that they are _citoyens_."

"And pale children who would be Emperor? Are those also _citoyens_?"

"You are an aristocrat, and a Prince besides," Lafayette said apologetically, "it is in your nature to confuse heredity with competency."

"You are also an aristocrat."

"That is how I know you."

"And the Bonapartists? Their titles are just out of the box, and yet they have seemed aristocrat enough to believe this thing."

"Do you think so? I disagree. Herr Prince, you wish to steer a middle course between what is glorious and what is right, and that I cannot fault you. But you also seem to wish to sail backwards. You would preserve a corpse because it is comforting. Herr Prince, I think that in your prudence, you have supported your cause to death."

"You have no proof!" Cried the Austrian.

"But what should I _do_!?" cried the citizen-king, who was more prudently concerned with the ominous mob at his gates than the disposition of a half-dead boy who some called the King of Rome. Just a few minuted before the heat of this conversation, M. Delessert, having slipped away from the custody of the revolutionaries, had come to warn them of the temper in the streets and also gathered a force under a certain number of loyalist generals: monarchists devoted to the House of Bourbon, Prussians, and Austrians. To these, the most impassioned speech of Grandeur in his heightened passion would do infuriate, rather than inflame. These brave and dedicated souls had even now begun to engage the insurgents at the gate, forcing the battle into the surrounding streets and a little onto the banks of the Seine, above the Pont Notre Dame. This would come to be known as the Terrible Moments, or _la guerre de cinq-minutes_.

In that time, the chaos that gripped the insurgency was formidable. The battle was led by Reille on the one flank with the conscripted Army, under him his general and aide was the General-Baron Caudelac. The other wing was led by Enjolras, Jeanne his aide, and those forces assembled were sparked suddenly by several reports of grape from the suddenly opened gates of the Hôtel de Ville.

In the first minute, the sudden resistance before the hour that had been appointed to knock politely upon the gate startled the insurgents so that they fell back to the Blvd. Sebastopol.

In the second minute, Reille and Enjolras rallied, though Reille responded a touch more slowly, and they thusly met the charging enemy.

In the third minute, the Division of Jeanne overwhelmed their challengers and, followed by the Division of Caudelac (a motley assortment of national guard with half-stripped uniforms by this time), who went as mad as the cavalry at Borodino following the death of Montbrun.

In the fourth minute, Clausel and Soult arrived in precisely the way that Grouchy did not at Waterloo, the one via Les Halles and the other from Saint-Michel. The Bourbon forces were pushed back within the gate, shooting desperately and badly crippled. Cannons, which had not been fired since the initial sprout of grape, bristled readily on both sides, the potential for more as always a powerful punitive reminder.

In the fifth minute, the order was given by Louis-Phillipe to Delessert, who had been badly wounded by a shot from Enjolras's musket, to desist. Thus, the city was surrendered.

In the accounting afterward, it was noted that the actual casualties were startlingly few: a total of eight dead on the royalist side, and twelve on the revolutionary. A good deal more were wounded in some capacity, but this was negligible in the face of what had been accomplished here. The worse off were taken at once to the Invalides, even as Louis-Phillipe, Lafayette behind him and Metternich swiftly en-route to Austria, issued a series of proclamations to general acclaim. The first created France a Republic once more, the next few promoted Jeanne and Combeferre to the ministry, and there was weeping as he pinned his own Legion of Honour to the chest of Enjolras. That youth spoke to him gravely from the words of Grandeur, and with such depth, that even Louis was moved, and tears streaked his face as he saluted the insurgent.

But no one knew, for some time, what had become of Grandeur. Concerned murmuring spread throughout the afternoon and into the early evening, but it was not until almost dark that he was found.


	12. Dawn Conceals and a Kiss blots out

His body was lying against the side of a building in the rue de la Coutillerie, overlooked for at first he appeared to be a sleeping drunkard. The bandage of his wound had soaked through and begun to hemmorage, due to an unhappy accident that had caused him to be swept away from his comrades in the chaotic retreat of the first minute, and also to a bayonet that had got him in the lung, besides. 

He was taken into the Hôtel de Ville and lain on a table therein, about which a remarkable conference was held. 

"Here is the hero of the Revolution," said Jeanne to the Citoyen Louis-Phillipe, who recoiled to see the enormous ogre stretched out upon his dining table, "He must be installed in the Pantheon, next to Robespierre and Danton." 

"No," said Combeferre, "It is passed from us, as all great men must." and then he made a speech, a remarkable speech, at the end of which the face of Enjolras had lost its habitual marble-like pallor and looked rather as scarlet with shock as the cap that he wrenched between his two hands. The rest of the men assembled were fixed with looks somewhat less stricken, though certainly surprised, save perhaps the former king, whose expression aped Enjolras. He would have titled Combeferre on the spot, save there were to be no more titles of that kind: so he made him a General instead. 

"It is fitting, I think," said Honoré, "I did not know him well but I do not think it ill befitting." 

"You are wrong," said Caudelac to Combeferre, "It is the dead great man that reminds, that teaches, and the name is as important as the deed." 

"It is," said Combeferre, and when he smiled it put Honoré and Caudelac in mind of Mephistopheles, "but not to the lessons we teach today." 

"Here," muttered Lafayette, "Is an answer without a question." But he did not mean to be heard, and was not. 

Enjolras grabbed Combeferre's arm, making his protest felt. 

"He was more than that," He said. Combeferre smiled but did not shake his head. 

"He would have wanted it this way." And he could almost hear Grantaire's rough, sardonic voice saying, 'let him take _that_ as he will.' When Combeferre turned away he closed his eyes and drew the curtain across the window nearest, so that the others would not see him cry. 

And so there was a state funeral, held at the Arc de Triomphe, whereunder were lain together the dead of the insurgency and the Bourbon resistance both in a common grave. Afterwards, for the first time, the constitution drafted by Jeanne, Combeferre, Louis-Phillipe, Lafayette, Reille, Soult and the others present at the conference was read aloud by Armand Clausel to the people. Many wept openly, some cried out in anger, but the world was reborn in that hour, and the grave whereupon the mourners stood was a grave kissed full by the dawn. No names were inscribed upon the plaque which marked the grave, but rather the following, which was the summit of the speech Combeferre had given in the Hôtel de Ville: 

ICI REPOSE: 

The ideas of Tyranny, of Monarchy, and of Doubt  
Buried here with these Brave Warriors lies also an Idea Cancerous to the State:  
That the Hearts of the French People are frail,  
That their will is not Sovereign,  
And that a Man is more glorious than an Idea.

These men died so that those who believe in nothing  
Might have Peace. 

Bending over the memorial Adrien Enjolras, Minister of the Republic deposited a kiss thereupon, and straightened sanctimoniously, to recite the final words of the dedication. A tear perhaps slid down his cheek in the course of this, but that was all. 


End file.
